What is a wiki? Wikipedia, probably the most famous wiki of all, defines it as follows:
A wiki (IPA: [ˈwɪ.kiː] or [ˈwiː.kiː] is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, and edit content. A collaborative technology for organizing information on Web sites, the first wiki (WikiWikiWeb) was developed by Ward Cunningham in the mid-1990s. Wikis allow for linking among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring.
The existence of this Business Day wiki stems from an article in the June 20 edition of the newspaper on the rising use of wikis, blogs and other collaborative technologies in business schools in SA and abroad.
We thought it would be fun and informative to allow readers of the newspaper first-hand experience of a wiki, by making the article available to them for editing online, so please add meaningful content, or make meaningful changes, to the article, which appears below.
You can stay anonymous (although your IP address will be displayed) - just click on "edit" at the bottom of the page and get working. Or, if you'd like to be identifiable as a contributor (and hide your IP address), first create a free account by clicking on "create account" at the top right-hand side of the page. You will be asked for your email address, but this will not appear on the article; you will be identified by the user name you choose.
You will also see a box below the "edit" section, in which you can explain any changes you have made and/or identify yourself as the author of the changes.
Click on "preview" to view changes while you work, and "save" when you're done.
Have fun. We look forward to seeing the end result.
Sue Blaine
The changing face of internet communication
Sue Blaine
Education Correspondent
MANY South Africans have only a vague notion of what Web 2.0 is, but its technology is changing the way people communicate and a few South African business schools have joined their international counterparts in using them to present classes — and even to present classes on how to use them in business.
In doing so they are helping to bring about a paradigm shift in the way people think about doing business and marketing products.
“In the 21st century your biggest competitive advantage is about sharing information instead of keeping it to yourself,” says Elaine Rumboll, director of executive education at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business (GSB). The economics of this is explained in Yochai Benkler's fascinating book, A Wealth of Networks. But the argument is summed up in one sentence by Einstein, "If I give you a penny, you will be one penny richer and I'll still have it too."
The changes are so important the GSB is offering SA’s first “crash course”, aimed at executives who want to “engage with the dynamic, global and accessible online market”, starting on July 17.
What is so powerful about these new technologies is that they have created “platforms” which enable anyone with Internet access to network in a easy manner, and while these platforms have mostly been used for social interaction these networks can be used in business, with phenomenal success.
“The use of social media has grown exponentially in the last year. This growth is almost unprecedented and there is suddenly a very real opportunity which many executives are aware of, but don't know how to capitalise (on it),” says Dave Duarte, “chief marketing geek” of Cerebra, a consultancy which shows people how to use the new so-called Web 2.0 technologies to their advantage. Duarte is also course director for the GSB’s Nomadic Marketing course.
SA has a home-grown, startling, example of just how powerful Web 2.0 marketing is. Stormhoek, a South African winery co-owned by the UK’s Orbital Wines and South African wine marketer Graham Knox, went from virtually unknown to annual sales of around 350000 cases and now accounts for 17% of all South African wine sold in the UK in the under-£5 category. It all started with a blog.
Recruiting the help of the top British blogger - cartoonist Hugh MacLeod - Graham launched the now-famous Stormhoek marketing campaign in 2005, offering 100 free bottles of Stormhoek to regular bloggers on his website who were asked to blog their comments and experiences with the wine, says Jon Foster-Pedley, senior lecturer at the GSB.
There’s a sense of discovery and of "Wow! There’s something going on here."
The wine took off in the UK and the US. There are now over 225000 Google links to it and the Stormhoek website has over 1 million hits per day, more than any other wine producer in the world, says Wine.co.za. Search "wine'' in Google and you will getover 180000000 hits - of which Stormhoek is about number 20.
“There’s a sense of discovery and of ‘Wow! There’s something going on here’,” says Foster-Pedley, who says while it is easy for Web 2.0 to generate hype, he does not forsee the same kind of deflation as that which ruined some fortunes when the dot.com bubble burst.
“It’s really an exciting time in education and in industry because of the impact of digital media and the Internet on collaboration,” Harvard Business School chief information officer Stephen Laster said in an interview with CIO.com.
While Web 2.0 tools’ marketing uses are obvious, Foster-Pedley says he believes the big conundrums of the day, such as global warming, will benefit from the kind of mass collaboration these tools enable.
“If you get enough people talking about something, you’ll generally end up with a pretty good answer … People are beginning to understand that massive collaboration could bring back our fish,” he says. In principle he is right, but the word 'talking' is probably a misnomer - 'writing' might be a better choice! This brings the issue of proper communication to the fore. Some may claim that text messaging on cellular phones has already 'corrupted' the use of proper grammar in writing and now technology will further limit the personal interaction between people and less verbal conversation. Others claim that for the first time massive, democratic communication is now possible and that Web2 allows healthy debate and collaboration to emerge beyond borders and political systems.
On a smaller scale, Greg Fisher, senior lecturer at the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs) is using Web 2.0 applications to help students ready themselves for his entrepreneurship course, which starts in a few weeks.
He’s using a wiki — a website that allows visitors to add, remove, and edit content — to present his students with the initial coursework, which they have to read ahead of the start, and has asked that the students put their initial business ideas, which are to be developed over the duration of the course on the wiki for all to see.
“Usually you would print out the notes (for students to read ahead of the start of the course) and the students would have to come to Gibs to fetch them … but the course evolves over time. The notes are a static document, on the wiki we can add to them when we like. Usually there is very little room for students to give feedback and contribute, they can on the wiki,” he says.
The wiki’s second advantage illustrates the mind-shift the Web 2.0 technologies are bringing about.
The students are beginning to load their initial ideas onto the wiki, where they are out in the open for all (on the course) to see, and Fisher wants students to encourage and criticise each other’s ideas.
He says there was some initial hesitation from students. “I think over time that will improve. Some are still getting comfortable with the idea that others can see their original idea. They don’t have to reveal any key intellectual property, it’s more the global idea.”
We will look back in five years and everyone will be using a wiki
Fisher says e-mail will probably become “a thing of the past” for businesses, which will increasingly turn to wikis and blogs to communicate with, and among, staff. As a result configuration management will become critical to manage and track changes, but most technology solutions carry such control measures as default in any case.
“Business teams will then have a record of how the solution was reached, and businesses can build up a corporate memory … I don’t think things will change very quickly, but we will look back in five years and everyone will be using a wiki,” he says. The role of the professional hardcopy letter & email as a form of business communication will reduce in usage in the workplace, with businesses facing an ongoing challenge of maintaining an acceptable level of professionalism that business partners still expect. Technological advances in communications is heralding a growing informality evident in how and what people communicate with each other in the business world.
Despite a deal of discussion, the relevance of Web 2.0 technologies to the enterprise is not yet clear. A recent debate in Boston between two noted academics in the field, Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee, has received a extensive coverage by bloggers, but the point that came out most strongly is that this is a technology that is still in the early stages of adoption [http://woodrow.typepad.com/the_ponderings_of_woodrow/2007/06/mcafee_vs_daven.html] .
For South Africa, with a cavernous digital divide, the social networking power of Web 2.0 will probably need to wait on the development of the mobile internet. The MXit chat service is an early glimpse, but fully-fledged wireless internet on cellphones will bring much deeper changes to people who are currently neither "net native" or "net immigrant", but "net-less".
